A strong wind blows and all at once the figs fly through the air ‘en masse’, like a sudden hailstorm. A foretaste of this event is not only found in the seventh plague in Egypt,1 but also in the events Joshua describes at the battle near Gibeon.2 “Sun, stand still over Gibeon, and you, moon, over the Valley of Aijalon,” Joshua says. “Then the sun stood still in the sky and was in no haste to set for around a whole day. There has never been a day like this, neither before, nor afterwards, when the Lord listened to someone’s voice in this way, for the Lord fought for Israel.”
This ‘standing still of the sun’ is accompanied by great stones falling from the sky.
According to Galileo’s and Copernicus’ view of the world we should not talk about the ‘sun standing still’. Because the sun always stands still. It is the earth that rotates, not the sun. The phenomenon that happened is about the slowing down of the earth’s speed of rotation on its axis, plus maybe a slight shifting of the axis of the earth plus maybe a temporarily slowing down of the speed of the earth’s orbit round the sun—whatever the cause may have been for that.
The great ‘stones’ falling from the sky are called ‘hailstones’ in several translations of the Bible. But are they hailstones of ice, or could they be meteorites from a comet’s tail, which penetrated the atmosphere like a swarm of fiery stones? Perhaps that burning comet/ asteroid almost crashed into the earth, coming close enough to planet earth to cause this result of slowing down earth’ rotation speed; slowing it down so abruptly, causing the effect that the sun and the moon seem to ‘stand still over Gibeon and the Valley of Ayalon’? The Hebrew text speaks of ‘stones of ‘barad’, just like the seventh plague in Egypt. The Jewish Talmud says that these were burning stones—not ice-hail. These stones fell with ‘fire in the midst of the hail’.3 Scholars speculate about the extinction of the dinosaurs and suspect cosmic catastrophes in the past history of the earth that it had been hit by impacts of enormous meteorites/asteroids from space, which broke through the atmosphere like swarms of falling stars. The image of dropped winter figs illustrates that it happens suddenly and, like a terrible storm, with catastrophic consequences. If what is described here is the result of a rapidly approaching comet/asteroid (burning stars falling from the sky)4, or several Heavenly bodies, then earthquakes5 and the eclipse of the sun and the will be the direct consequences as the light of the sun and moon are blotted out by atmospheric dust, producing a blood-red effect. Whatever the case may be, God’s wrath has come.
• Fig trees bear fruit three times in Israel: the ‘pre-figs’6 in March/April, which are almost without any juice; the ‘early figs’7 towards the end of May and the beginning of June; and the ‘late figs’ in August. Fruit buds are produced until late in the summer but those young figs do not ripen and are sometimes suddenly ripped off by the winter storms. Moreover, these late or winter figs hang on to the branches so strongly that the great might of a storm is necessary to rip them off!
Bible References
1.Exodus 9:13–35 2.Joshua 10:6–15 3.Exodus 9:24 4.Revelation 8:7–12 5.Revelation 6:12 6.Song of Solomon 2:13 7.Hosea 9:10; Isaiah 28:4, see also Nahum 3:12; Jeremiah 24; 1 Chronicles 12:40; 1 Samuel 25:18 and Isaiah 38:21
